The article's not about why they went indie, it's about people who went indie. Why they went indie is one small component of an article that also addresses some of the challenges they faced in the transformation and how well it has or hasn't worked for them.
Did you even RTFA or are you just griping for the sake of it?
NCSoft is developing Aion as well as publishing it (second to last paragraph in the article). Which is good, because ArenaNet, over the last year and a half or so, has shown an unrelenting ability to run Guild Wars straight into the ground.
No, your analogy is absurd. There is no comparison between the material acquisition of necessities and comforts and a few INSERT and UPDATE statements in a Blizzard database. You can't just whip out any old comparison and call it relevant, the comparisons have to be at least somewhat similar to each other.
And, even ignoring the absurd stretch, your analogy isn't comparing like things anyway. Drug dealers actually have to participate in drug deals just like your players participate in quests. Your lazy merchant analogy is more like a vendor compared to a vending machine. The vending machine sells by proxy the way Glider plays by proxy, and the vendor deal directly with customers the way players deal directly with the WoW world.
If I put a vending machine up and only stop by often enough to check its stock and empty the money, do I not deserve the income because I wasn't there actively selling things?
Your immature little outburst would be far less foolish if you were insulting someone who actually played the game, never mind someone who botted in it. I have never managed to stay interested long enough to get past L59 on a single character, I'm merely observing that there is no practical difference between someone who sits and pounds WASD and 0-9 for 10 hours to level and a program that calls SendKeys() for 10 hours to level. Both accounts have 10 hours of time on them, both accounts are at the same level.
I note that you've not actually refuted that claim.
No, it's not a strawman, not even close. It's apparently a misunderstanding on my part. I thought he was referring to killing monsters, looting them, and selling the loot.
Regardless, the point still stands even if the mechanics described are slightly different. I don't see how walking up to veins/plants/etc. and clicking them really required any effort.
Somebody else already made a good point on it anyway, though, so its a moot point: apparently bots camp at them and grab the resources as soon as they respawn. I wasn't aware of that (hence the reason I'm asking for input).
If you actually played WoW, you would understand the reasons against botting. However you don't, but it doesn't seems to stop you from trolling for comments...
Which is why I'm asking other people for their input. I note that you couldn't be bothered to provide any without an insult first.
Don't waste your time responding. I won't dignify any further outbursts like that with my attention.
You made the same point as the other guy, and it's a legitimate response to my question, so I'll just interject my opinion with the understanding that I'm not disagreeing with your particular take on the matter:
That's just a design flaw.
In fact, that's really what WoW, to me anyway, appears to be: one giant bundle of design flaws. It just seems like they built a game that, in the end, could initially interest a lot of different people, but would inevitably infuriate and frustrate a substantial portion of them. If I don't automate resource collection, and I have other responsibilities (or just don't want to play for insane amounts of time) I'm penalized and ultimately locked out of substantial portions of the game. However, if I do automate that collection, people who spend substantial time in the game feel slighted.
I guess I can't really feel for Blizzard or its players on this matter, because it just seems to me like Blizzard invited this sort of thing on itself. I don't know that I agree that Glider should be deemed illegal, but I definitely think it's unethical, but I also think it's Blizzard's poor design that made it an issue in the first place.
You'll have to explain the effort part to me (well, you don't have to unless you want me to understand your point of view). I've played WoW a few times over the last 3 years and, frankly, I don't think it requires any real effort at all outside of instances. Whacking away at enemies seemed mostly a matter of being smart enough to not pick a fight with something stronger than you and hitting the right sequence of number keys again and again.
Where's the effort in that? I mean, you could do quests, but bots don't do quests, and monster grind is a legitimate form of leveling in WoW so....
I don't play WoW because I generally get bored with it after about a month, so this doesn't really affect me one way or the other. Your response, however, seems mostly based on emotion. I'm looking for pragmatic reasons to not allow botting.
Yes, the rules are a legitimate reason to reject bots, but they're not really a practical reason. I'm looking for a clear explanation of what the difference is between getting to L60/70 in 10 days with a bot, or 10 days hitting the keys yourself. Neither person person gains an advantage, and to play the instances - the meat of the game, really - they're going to have to kick the bot off and take control anyway.
I'm collecting differing opinions here, so yes, I already asked this farther up in the thread: how is this cheating?
I think we can both agree the leveling and resource acquisition in WoW requires next to no skill. If it required skill, bots wouldn't be able to do it, because bots can't (yet) emulate active human thought processes.
So, in the end, leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure. Why does it matter, then, if I use a bot to put in 10 hours while I'm at work, or a college kid on break puts in 10 hours while I'm at work? We both end up in the same place at the same time, so nobody has an advantage. In fact, since it's a matter of time, people who can't be at the computer the maximum amount of time actually have a DISADVANTAGE by design. They're penalized for not devoting time to the game.
Why is that acceptable, but erasing the penalty via the use of a bot is "cheating"?
Curiosity... can you justify your argument in any practical way? If a bot plays 10 hours while I'm at work, and a college kid on break plays 10 hours while I'm at work, we both wind up in the same place at the same time. Neither of us has an advantage.
WoW leveling requires exactly zero skill, same with resource acquisition. Since leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure - by design, mind you - why does it matter whether or not a player puts in that time, or a bot does?
I hate to be "that guy", but I hate WoW. There are a few fun parts and endless hours of pointless toil in between them. If I could let a robot play through the endless grind of killing and collecting trash to get to the next entertaining portion of the game, I'd be thrilled.
I don't know, maybe MMOs can't be fun. Maybe it's not possible to put up enough unique and entertaining content to keep people hooked on it for years at a time. Maybe the only way to keep people playing is to endlessly hold a carrot in front of them and hope they chase it for as long as it's there.
What doesn't sit well with me is that they took photos of the property and used it as part of the business venture. Simply crossing onto private property by mistake isn't trespassing in most jurisdictions. You normally have to either knowingly do it without permission, or do it with some sort of ill intent to actually be charged with anything, or become lawsuit fodder.
That's not what Google did in this case though. They accidentally crossed onto someone's private property and then took photos which they used to try and make a profit.
The 'mental stress' thing seems pretty absurd, but it would be nice to see Google penalized for trespassing given that the illegitimate use of the photos.
In the end, it just seems to me that if Google is not held liable here, and their flimsy argument is accepted, the precedent set is that you can enter another person's private property for your own purposes and just claim it was an accident. It shifts the burden of responsibility onto the homeowner instead of the business or individual crossing property lines. Basically, the only way to get relief would be to either prove intent - nearly impossible - or to simply barricade yourself on your own property so that people can't make the claim that they got on your lawn by "mistake".
The responsibility for trespassing should rest first on the individual in transit. If they don't know where they're going, they should be expected to exercise caution, and they certainly should be expected to exercise reasonable discretion in what they do when they have potentially crossed onto someone else's property.
Of course, aside from all of this, I'd like to see Google's street view program wiped out anyway. I'd really prefer that if people wanted to take pictures of my house and use them for their own money-making schemes they were bound by law to get my explicit permission first.
That's what I really don't get about people who are arguing in favor of Google on this matter. They drove up a private lane, took pictures of private property, and posted it for business purposes on the internet. Yes, they took it down, yes, they were unaware that they drove up a private lane.
However, the property owners were minding their own business, whereas Google was actively engaged in a business endeavor when it blundered onto somebody else's land. It seems to me that the burden here should be placed much more on Google than on the homeowners. Arguing in favor of Google here is effectively arguing that businesses shouldn't have to be responsible for knowing where they are and what they're doing in cases like this.
I think ruling in favor of Google, here, would set a nasty precedent regarding the responsibilities of businesses in relation to their duties to act responsibly with other people's information.
You're going to have to clarify your point here for me, I'm afraid. The opinion you're citing refers to foreigners, the same thing the other poster has been harping on, but the complaint made against the NSA warrantless wiretapping is that U.S. citizens were involved in the surveillance. It's an unresolved legal issue: can the government, without a warrant, eavesdrop on an American citizen?
Furthermore, I looked up the Court of Review finding you're referring to, and in it the court ruled that FISA is quite constitutional, in contention with your opening statement on the matter.
The fact that I managed to cut off half of my statement somehow probably did not help matters...
I feel that a warrant should not be required at the data-mining stage, but every stage thereafter.
That's a whole other debate. The point of FISA isn't to arbitrarily mine data, it's to be able to quickly eavesdrop without undue delay in cases where there is a credible reason to believe that there is information that would benefit the cause of national security.
They're not supposed to be arbitrarily intercepting calls at all, the administration isn't even arguing for that power (at least, not yet). They're supposed to be eavesdropping in cases where the source of the call is an individual who may provide information relevant to national security interests. FISA already provided for that. If they wanted the ability to create an enormous data mining operation - which is not what they're claiming, mind you - they should have approached Congress to authorize such a program.
Tapping calls that have at least one end in a foreign country is not out of bounds as the fourth does not apply to foreign phones.
Well, you can hold this opinion if you want, but you're on awfully shaky legal ground, and you're not even in line with the arguments being made by the administration.
Again, the administration is not arguing that it's not inherently unconstitutional, the administration is arguing that it was explicitly authorized in these circumstances by the AUMF passed shortly after 9/11. Nobody involved in this issue is arguing that, absent the AUMF resolution, what was done would be clearly and unequivocally illegal. They're arguing that the AUMF resolution made the activity legal, and that's the issue that is as-yet, unresolved. Like I said, however, the administration has tried to hold the AUMF up before to justify questionable behavior, and the results have been a mixed bag thus far.
I'm sure we can agree that something needs to be designed to handle this, without compromising national security, state secrets, or individual rights.
I'm afraid we cannot. This entire debate really comes down to whether or not the administration should be subjected to oversight from FISC. I don't see why they shouldn't, they haven't provided any evidence that being subjected to the oversight did or would have stunted their ability to collect intel, so I don't see why they shouldn't simply be rebuked for what they did and told to fall in line or present their rationale for needing an expanded wiretap power.
My opinion is this: this administration has executed one of the most egregious power grabs in recent executive branch history, and ignoring FISA was just another blatant attempt at consolidating that power. I doubt there is any justification for it, I suspect they simply did it as a snub to the court and Congress because they knew they'd get away with it.
You don't need a warrant to tap a foreign phone. The forth does not apply overseas.
That has nothing to do with this. The argument over the warrantless wiretapping involves proponents in the administration who argue that FISA requirements were superseded by the resolutions passed in response to the 9/11 attacks. They're basically arguing that they're not obligated to get warrants when they believe that one end of the communication is a member of Al Quaeda or an individual supporting Al Quaeda in some way.
There is no legitimate debate from any involved party as to whether or not, prior to the AUMF resolution, that the wiretapping in question would have required FISC authorization. The argument being made is that the AUMF resolution implicitly de-authorized the warrant requirements of FISA. This is a highly dubious legal interpretation, and one which not all members of even the Bush administration were willing to stand behind. Furthermore, if it's not extralegal, why keep it secret, why does anyone need telco immunity, and why not just divulge the details of the case and allow it to be litigated?
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the program was legal until it was made explicitly so after the fact. There have already been very mixed results in litigating various administration behaviors in relation to the AUMF, so whether or not they could successfully press this argument is very much up in the air.
Sorry if you hold "national security" to such a low regard. Do you leave your doors unlocked when you go to bed?
I asked for specific citations regarding the manner in which "national security" was achieved or reasonably pursued in relation to warrantless wiretapping. You have provided strawmen about my house and my personal feelings.
Furthermore, I do not hold national security in "such a low regard". I asked for evidence that national security objectives were achieved rather than empty statements that it was being pursued in some non-specific way.
It seems to me that actually pursuing evidence of progress on national security matters would be holding the concept in much higher regard than simply accepting arbitrary claims without any measurable evidence of success.
Congress has made it perfectly clear that such wiretapping is NOT illegal.
First of all, my commentary is not immature, it is simply opinionated. I'm under no obligation to be even-handed here, and you shouldn't assume that I'm going to be. I oppose excessive government powers of any stripe, and if secretly wiretapping citizens and refusing to allow any meaningful oversight isn't an excessive power, I don't know what is.
Second of all, Congress only made it explicitly legal after it was discovered. Whether or not it was legal before that is highly debatable, and whether or not it's legal now is still not entirely certain. Congress has attempted to bail out illegal administration practices before and had their laws slapped down by the courts on Constitutional grounds. One of the major arguments against this practice is that it's a Constitutional violation.
If it bothers you, however, I could call it unethical wiretapping. That's a clear matter of opinion.
And, as a footnote to all this, we haven't even touched on one crucial component of the argument: what was wrong with the existing FISA provisions anyway?
How is wiretapping Americans making phone calls not spying on Americans making phone calls? It seems to me that wiretapping is most certainly a form of spying and I'd be interested in what legitimate definition of spying you're using in which wiretapping, for some reason, just doesn't count.
nor "for no reason."
Fine. What reason then? Cite instances where the American government has wiretapped an American citizen and either explained clearly and completely why they did it, or
My standards of proof are higher than just taking mush-mouthed claims of "national security" to heart and walking away. What credible threats were investigated and what, if any, convictions (hell, what charges even) stemmed from any of the illegal wiretapping?
Now, on top of that, justify the illegal aspect of it by explaining why the existing FISA standards had to be illegally circumvented in each case.
The truth of the matter is conversations originating overseas from known or suspected terrorist organizations to their contacts in the U.S. may be monitored.
Yes, with proper warrants. Hence the difference between wiretapping which everyone is or could be made aware of and what we're actually discussing here: secret and illegal warrantless wiretapping.
with Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Since your commentary is so immature, I won't bother dignifying any response you post with further attention. I'm sure if I wanted a legitimate discussion instead of empty political theatrics, I could find it, so I don't need to bash my head on the wall with you.
Not to mention the fact that the program was divulged in 2005, and was active well before that, and that the current congress wasn't seated until January, 2007...
Aside from the fact that it was a republican administration that initiated the illegal program, four senior republican lawmakers who attempted to expand it with the "Terrorist Surveillance Act (2006)" and a senior republican (Specter R-PA) who introduced immunity, I can completely see how it wasn't the republicans who created the wiretapping and immunity mess...
I don't disagree with the notion that our standards are too low, but framing the discussion within the confines of our current system, I think that this is a reasonable avenue of inquiry.
I pointed out in another post somewhere in this thread that the Batman mythos has gone off on all sorts of different tangents, and you can only really critique each one as if it were its own little reality. I always preferred the darker more cerebral versions of the character that cropped up after The Dark Knight Returns, so my vision of what Batman's world "really" is mostly hinges on that particular style of storytelling.
So, yes, you're right, my version of Batman above is just one of the many different incarnations of Gotham City. There are lots of alternative, equally valid worlds he's been pushed into by different writers and different mediums.
Well, if you're going to remove yourself from the context of the storytelling, obviously there aren't going to be any supervillians like the Joker...
But within the context of the story, the point was this: Batman attempted to impose order by brutalizing the criminal element until it was too beaten and scared to stand against him. When that happened, only a few well-financed, high-powered, or outright-insane villians could continue to fight him, and with organized crime no longer in control of the underworld in Gotham, they had an arena in which to do it.
By taking street crime and organized crime out of the picture, Batman removed a barrier that prevented the supervillians from moving in to take Gotham, because the "common" criminals had just as much a reason to oppose the supervillians, in most case, as Batman does. No matter how deadly Joker is, he can't exist in a world where both the corrupt police AND organized crime have a reason to oppose him because they'll hunt him down and destroy him, but if he's only opposed by Batman, he's a one-man army facing a one-man army.
A common theme in Batman his how Wayne is tortured by the fact that he may have caused a lot more suffering in Gotham by donning his mantle than if he had simply internalized his own suffering and let it him alive.
The question becomes: Did Batman help Gotham by taking up his crusade, or did he just unleash the pain he was suffering on the entire population?
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The article's not about why they went indie, it's about people who went indie. Why they went indie is one small component of an article that also addresses some of the challenges they faced in the transformation and how well it has or hasn't worked for them.
Did you even RTFA or are you just griping for the sake of it?
NCSoft is developing Aion as well as publishing it (second to last paragraph in the article). Which is good, because ArenaNet, over the last year and a half or so, has shown an unrelenting ability to run Guild Wars straight into the ground.
No, your analogy is absurd. There is no comparison between the material acquisition of necessities and comforts and a few INSERT and UPDATE statements in a Blizzard database. You can't just whip out any old comparison and call it relevant, the comparisons have to be at least somewhat similar to each other.
And, even ignoring the absurd stretch, your analogy isn't comparing like things anyway. Drug dealers actually have to participate in drug deals just like your players participate in quests. Your lazy merchant analogy is more like a vendor compared to a vending machine. The vending machine sells by proxy the way Glider plays by proxy, and the vendor deal directly with customers the way players deal directly with the WoW world.
If I put a vending machine up and only stop by often enough to check its stock and empty the money, do I not deserve the income because I wasn't there actively selling things?
Your immature little outburst would be far less foolish if you were insulting someone who actually played the game, never mind someone who botted in it. I have never managed to stay interested long enough to get past L59 on a single character, I'm merely observing that there is no practical difference between someone who sits and pounds WASD and 0-9 for 10 hours to level and a program that calls SendKeys() for 10 hours to level. Both accounts have 10 hours of time on them, both accounts are at the same level.
I note that you've not actually refuted that claim.
No, it's not a strawman, not even close. It's apparently a misunderstanding on my part. I thought he was referring to killing monsters, looting them, and selling the loot.
Regardless, the point still stands even if the mechanics described are slightly different. I don't see how walking up to veins/plants/etc. and clicking them really required any effort.
Somebody else already made a good point on it anyway, though, so its a moot point: apparently bots camp at them and grab the resources as soon as they respawn. I wasn't aware of that (hence the reason I'm asking for input).
Which is why I'm asking other people for their input. I note that you couldn't be bothered to provide any without an insult first.
Don't waste your time responding. I won't dignify any further outbursts like that with my attention.
You made the same point as the other guy, and it's a legitimate response to my question, so I'll just interject my opinion with the understanding that I'm not disagreeing with your particular take on the matter:
That's just a design flaw.
In fact, that's really what WoW, to me anyway, appears to be: one giant bundle of design flaws. It just seems like they built a game that, in the end, could initially interest a lot of different people, but would inevitably infuriate and frustrate a substantial portion of them. If I don't automate resource collection, and I have other responsibilities (or just don't want to play for insane amounts of time) I'm penalized and ultimately locked out of substantial portions of the game. However, if I do automate that collection, people who spend substantial time in the game feel slighted.
I guess I can't really feel for Blizzard or its players on this matter, because it just seems to me like Blizzard invited this sort of thing on itself. I don't know that I agree that Glider should be deemed illegal, but I definitely think it's unethical, but I also think it's Blizzard's poor design that made it an issue in the first place.
In other words: fail all around.
You'll have to explain the effort part to me (well, you don't have to unless you want me to understand your point of view). I've played WoW a few times over the last 3 years and, frankly, I don't think it requires any real effort at all outside of instances. Whacking away at enemies seemed mostly a matter of being smart enough to not pick a fight with something stronger than you and hitting the right sequence of number keys again and again.
Where's the effort in that? I mean, you could do quests, but bots don't do quests, and monster grind is a legitimate form of leveling in WoW so....
I don't play WoW because I generally get bored with it after about a month, so this doesn't really affect me one way or the other. Your response, however, seems mostly based on emotion. I'm looking for pragmatic reasons to not allow botting.
Yes, the rules are a legitimate reason to reject bots, but they're not really a practical reason. I'm looking for a clear explanation of what the difference is between getting to L60/70 in 10 days with a bot, or 10 days hitting the keys yourself. Neither person person gains an advantage, and to play the instances - the meat of the game, really - they're going to have to kick the bot off and take control anyway.
So, really, what's the difference?
I'm collecting differing opinions here, so yes, I already asked this farther up in the thread: how is this cheating?
I think we can both agree the leveling and resource acquisition in WoW requires next to no skill. If it required skill, bots wouldn't be able to do it, because bots can't (yet) emulate active human thought processes.
So, in the end, leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure. Why does it matter, then, if I use a bot to put in 10 hours while I'm at work, or a college kid on break puts in 10 hours while I'm at work? We both end up in the same place at the same time, so nobody has an advantage. In fact, since it's a matter of time, people who can't be at the computer the maximum amount of time actually have a DISADVANTAGE by design. They're penalized for not devoting time to the game.
Why is that acceptable, but erasing the penalty via the use of a bot is "cheating"?
Curiosity... can you justify your argument in any practical way? If a bot plays 10 hours while I'm at work, and a college kid on break plays 10 hours while I'm at work, we both wind up in the same place at the same time. Neither of us has an advantage.
WoW leveling requires exactly zero skill, same with resource acquisition. Since leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure - by design, mind you - why does it matter whether or not a player puts in that time, or a bot does?
... being made into a fun game?
I hate to be "that guy", but I hate WoW. There are a few fun parts and endless hours of pointless toil in between them. If I could let a robot play through the endless grind of killing and collecting trash to get to the next entertaining portion of the game, I'd be thrilled.
I don't know, maybe MMOs can't be fun. Maybe it's not possible to put up enough unique and entertaining content to keep people hooked on it for years at a time. Maybe the only way to keep people playing is to endlessly hold a carrot in front of them and hope they chase it for as long as it's there.
What doesn't sit well with me is that they took photos of the property and used it as part of the business venture. Simply crossing onto private property by mistake isn't trespassing in most jurisdictions. You normally have to either knowingly do it without permission, or do it with some sort of ill intent to actually be charged with anything, or become lawsuit fodder.
That's not what Google did in this case though. They accidentally crossed onto someone's private property and then took photos which they used to try and make a profit.
The 'mental stress' thing seems pretty absurd, but it would be nice to see Google penalized for trespassing given that the illegitimate use of the photos.
In the end, it just seems to me that if Google is not held liable here, and their flimsy argument is accepted, the precedent set is that you can enter another person's private property for your own purposes and just claim it was an accident. It shifts the burden of responsibility onto the homeowner instead of the business or individual crossing property lines. Basically, the only way to get relief would be to either prove intent - nearly impossible - or to simply barricade yourself on your own property so that people can't make the claim that they got on your lawn by "mistake".
The responsibility for trespassing should rest first on the individual in transit. If they don't know where they're going, they should be expected to exercise caution, and they certainly should be expected to exercise reasonable discretion in what they do when they have potentially crossed onto someone else's property.
Of course, aside from all of this, I'd like to see Google's street view program wiped out anyway. I'd really prefer that if people wanted to take pictures of my house and use them for their own money-making schemes they were bound by law to get my explicit permission first.
That's what I really don't get about people who are arguing in favor of Google on this matter. They drove up a private lane, took pictures of private property, and posted it for business purposes on the internet. Yes, they took it down, yes, they were unaware that they drove up a private lane.
However, the property owners were minding their own business, whereas Google was actively engaged in a business endeavor when it blundered onto somebody else's land. It seems to me that the burden here should be placed much more on Google than on the homeowners. Arguing in favor of Google here is effectively arguing that businesses shouldn't have to be responsible for knowing where they are and what they're doing in cases like this.
I think ruling in favor of Google, here, would set a nasty precedent regarding the responsibilities of businesses in relation to their duties to act responsibly with other people's information.
You're going to have to clarify your point here for me, I'm afraid. The opinion you're citing refers to foreigners, the same thing the other poster has been harping on, but the complaint made against the NSA warrantless wiretapping is that U.S. citizens were involved in the surveillance. It's an unresolved legal issue: can the government, without a warrant, eavesdrop on an American citizen?
Furthermore, I looked up the Court of Review finding you're referring to, and in it the court ruled that FISA is quite constitutional, in contention with your opening statement on the matter.
The fact that I managed to cut off half of my statement somehow probably did not help matters...
That's a whole other debate. The point of FISA isn't to arbitrarily mine data, it's to be able to quickly eavesdrop without undue delay in cases where there is a credible reason to believe that there is information that would benefit the cause of national security.
They're not supposed to be arbitrarily intercepting calls at all, the administration isn't even arguing for that power (at least, not yet). They're supposed to be eavesdropping in cases where the source of the call is an individual who may provide information relevant to national security interests. FISA already provided for that. If they wanted the ability to create an enormous data mining operation - which is not what they're claiming, mind you - they should have approached Congress to authorize such a program.
Well, you can hold this opinion if you want, but you're on awfully shaky legal ground, and you're not even in line with the arguments being made by the administration.
Again, the administration is not arguing that it's not inherently unconstitutional, the administration is arguing that it was explicitly authorized in these circumstances by the AUMF passed shortly after 9/11. Nobody involved in this issue is arguing that, absent the AUMF resolution, what was done would be clearly and unequivocally illegal. They're arguing that the AUMF resolution made the activity legal, and that's the issue that is as-yet, unresolved. Like I said, however, the administration has tried to hold the AUMF up before to justify questionable behavior, and the results have been a mixed bag thus far.
I'm afraid we cannot. This entire debate really comes down to whether or not the administration should be subjected to oversight from FISC. I don't see why they shouldn't, they haven't provided any evidence that being subjected to the oversight did or would have stunted their ability to collect intel, so I don't see why they shouldn't simply be rebuked for what they did and told to fall in line or present their rationale for needing an expanded wiretap power.
My opinion is this: this administration has executed one of the most egregious power grabs in recent executive branch history, and ignoring FISA was just another blatant attempt at consolidating that power. I doubt there is any justification for it, I suspect they simply did it as a snub to the court and Congress because they knew they'd get away with it.
That has nothing to do with this. The argument over the warrantless wiretapping involves proponents in the administration who argue that FISA requirements were superseded by the resolutions passed in response to the 9/11 attacks. They're basically arguing that they're not obligated to get warrants when they believe that one end of the communication is a member of Al Quaeda or an individual supporting Al Quaeda in some way.
There is no legitimate debate from any involved party as to whether or not, prior to the AUMF resolution, that the wiretapping in question would have required FISC authorization. The argument being made is that the AUMF resolution implicitly de-authorized the warrant requirements of FISA. This is a highly dubious legal interpretation, and one which not all members of even the Bush administration were willing to stand behind. Furthermore, if it's not extralegal, why keep it secret, why does anyone need telco immunity, and why not just divulge the details of the case and allow it to be litigated?
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the program was legal until it was made explicitly so after the fact. There have already been very mixed results in litigating various administration behaviors in relation to the AUMF, so whether or not they could successfully press this argument is very much up in the air.
I asked for specific citations regarding the manner in which "national security" was achieved or reasonably pursued in relation to warrantless wiretapping. You have provided strawmen about my house and my personal feelings.
Furthermore, I do not hold national security in "such a low regard". I asked for evidence that national security objectives were achieved rather than empty statements that it was being pursued in some non-specific way.
It seems to me that actually pursuing evidence of progress on national security matters would be holding the concept in much higher regard than simply accepting arbitrary claims without any measurable evidence of success.
First of all, my commentary is not immature, it is simply opinionated. I'm under no obligation to be even-handed here, and you shouldn't assume that I'm going to be. I oppose excessive government powers of any stripe, and if secretly wiretapping citizens and refusing to allow any meaningful oversight isn't an excessive power, I don't know what is.
Second of all, Congress only made it explicitly legal after it was discovered. Whether or not it was legal before that is highly debatable, and whether or not it's legal now is still not entirely certain. Congress has attempted to bail out illegal administration practices before and had their laws slapped down by the courts on Constitutional grounds. One of the major arguments against this practice is that it's a Constitutional violation.
If it bothers you, however, I could call it unethical wiretapping. That's a clear matter of opinion.
And, as a footnote to all this, we haven't even touched on one crucial component of the argument: what was wrong with the existing FISA provisions anyway?
How is wiretapping Americans making phone calls not spying on Americans making phone calls? It seems to me that wiretapping is most certainly a form of spying and I'd be interested in what legitimate definition of spying you're using in which wiretapping, for some reason, just doesn't count.
Fine. What reason then? Cite instances where the American government has wiretapped an American citizen and either explained clearly and completely why they did it, or
My standards of proof are higher than just taking mush-mouthed claims of "national security" to heart and walking away. What credible threats were investigated and what, if any, convictions (hell, what charges even) stemmed from any of the illegal wiretapping?
Now, on top of that, justify the illegal aspect of it by explaining why the existing FISA standards had to be illegally circumvented in each case.
Yes, with proper warrants. Hence the difference between wiretapping which everyone is or could be made aware of and what we're actually discussing here: secret and illegal warrantless wiretapping.
Since your commentary is so immature, I won't bother dignifying any response you post with further attention. I'm sure if I wanted a legitimate discussion instead of empty political theatrics, I could find it, so I don't need to bash my head on the wall with you.
Not to mention the fact that the program was divulged in 2005, and was active well before that, and that the current congress wasn't seated until January, 2007...
Aside from the fact that it was a republican administration that initiated the illegal program, four senior republican lawmakers who attempted to expand it with the "Terrorist Surveillance Act (2006)" and a senior republican (Specter R-PA) who introduced immunity, I can completely see how it wasn't the republicans who created the wiretapping and immunity mess...
tom.gerke@embarq.com was the contact for the CEO back in March. I assume it is still legitimate...
I don't disagree with the notion that our standards are too low, but framing the discussion within the confines of our current system, I think that this is a reasonable avenue of inquiry.
Because you can be a less than perfect driver and still be good enough that it's not justified to take away your license.
It's not a substitute for basic competency, it's a way to improve on factors that are already deemed adequate, but could still be better.
I pointed out in another post somewhere in this thread that the Batman mythos has gone off on all sorts of different tangents, and you can only really critique each one as if it were its own little reality. I always preferred the darker more cerebral versions of the character that cropped up after The Dark Knight Returns, so my vision of what Batman's world "really" is mostly hinges on that particular style of storytelling.
So, yes, you're right, my version of Batman above is just one of the many different incarnations of Gotham City. There are lots of alternative, equally valid worlds he's been pushed into by different writers and different mediums.
Well, if you're going to remove yourself from the context of the storytelling, obviously there aren't going to be any supervillians like the Joker...
But within the context of the story, the point was this: Batman attempted to impose order by brutalizing the criminal element until it was too beaten and scared to stand against him. When that happened, only a few well-financed, high-powered, or outright-insane villians could continue to fight him, and with organized crime no longer in control of the underworld in Gotham, they had an arena in which to do it.
By taking street crime and organized crime out of the picture, Batman removed a barrier that prevented the supervillians from moving in to take Gotham, because the "common" criminals had just as much a reason to oppose the supervillians, in most case, as Batman does. No matter how deadly Joker is, he can't exist in a world where both the corrupt police AND organized crime have a reason to oppose him because they'll hunt him down and destroy him, but if he's only opposed by Batman, he's a one-man army facing a one-man army.
A common theme in Batman his how Wayne is tortured by the fact that he may have caused a lot more suffering in Gotham by donning his mantle than if he had simply internalized his own suffering and let it him alive.
The question becomes: Did Batman help Gotham by taking up his crusade, or did he just unleash the pain he was suffering on the entire population?